So i picked this record up from a bredren stepping up when i was 16 just getting into reggaem i had been exposed to radical reggae like Marley and Peter Tosh so i was increasingly interested in more of this music as it seemed to reflect my world view. Then the idren drops Nyahbinghi on me.. i went to the homiez pad who had a tabletop CDR burner andcmade a copy.... dude.. this is the most powerful spiritual music i had ever heard! I was enraptured and converted. Within 6 months i was growing dreads and sitting up on the hill in the East Los with the rastafari people.

Ras Michael is my friend now, i am as mystified when i am at his house as i was when i first heard that record. Ras Michael is the person who introduced me to the Orthodox Church.

To me itīs Jimi Hendrix Experience: Electric Ladyland. Itīs the first record that has experimental elements and I get fully into it. When my brother loaned it from a friend, he didnīt even listened as a whole, he just said "I think this is one of those mess records Hendrix made within using drugs too much". I didnīt also listened it then. But it had woken my interest, so I loaned it again maybe after year and then it hit me! I think I was at the age of 10 then.

Got it in my mid teens (before any of their 'proper' albums) and it seemed to join the dots between lots of stuff I was starting to get really interested in, not just in music but films, books, a whole culture.

This album got me away from Heavy Metal/Thrash music, and showed me complexity that punk did not have, and scared me with the bizarre sounds they pulled from guitars. It changed everything for me.

Yeah, the same is true for me.

Plenty of albums have influenced/changed my life, but I think Daydream Nation actually altered the way my mind functioned and perceived and experienced sound.

I think I had been secretly harboring some fear that I wouldn't like or understand it. I felt that same fear about certain literary works when I was a teenager, but I'd never felt that way about music. I was clearly afraid that my intelligence was somehow at stake, and that I was going to fail some crucial coming of age test if anything went over my head.

So I can't really express how utterly euphoric it felt when "Teen Age Riot" kicked into gear, and sounded exactly the way I wanted music to sound. I could hear the discordant elements in the songs, and somehow I understood that this was a test of sorts, if only to determine whether or not I was the kind of person who heard beauty in static and noise and ambience and deconstruction.

Turns out I was and always would be that kind of person.

But every track got my heart pumping like a fight song. There was beauty in the ugly moments and there was something much more complicated and almost scary in the beautiful moments. I'd never heard anything like it.

Not only did Daydream Nation help my mind connect the dots between the SY albums I'd already investigated (Jet Set, Washing Machine, Bad Moon Rising), it also equipped me with a context for records like Loveless and Psychocandy, which I owned but did not yet fully appreciate. It also showed me exactly why Nirvana's sound never seemed complete to me, because it showed me what I wished was there. It helped me to understand the inherent limitations imposed by "coloring within the lines."

I'm not sure any other album has ever communicated so much to me. It's not even my favorite Sonic Youth album!

To me itīs Jimi Hendrix Experience: Electric Ladyland. Itīs the first record that has experimental elements and I get fully into it. When my brother loaned it from a friend, he didnīt even listened as a whole, he just said "I think this is one of those mess records Hendrix made within using drugs too much". I didnīt also listened it then. But it had woken my interest, so I loaned it again maybe after year and then it hit me! I think I was at the age of 10 then.

Electric Ladyland is epic, that post Woodstock Hendrix is on a different wavelength, channeling what would become No Wave and Noise

i heard Nevermind really young. so that had a big impact. early teens. i felt lost as a kid until i heard that.

There quite literally millions of people who completely agree with you. I am one of them, i listened to Nirvana in elementary school and i think its very formative

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in between those there's those Beatles albums that made me appreciate songwriting.

I just wish someone had introduced me to John Lennon solo shit before i ever heard the Beatles. Man i couldn't stand the Beatles.. SOOOOOOO BORING and bland. Lennon solo shit is much better, indeed it made me come to appreciate what other people found in the Beatles.

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yes, i would listen Electric Ladyland over and over. Hendrix was some of the first classic rock music i heard.

Im glad so many of us picked this Hendrix. It is much better than the earlier stuff, better crafted yet more experimental.

Oh, i don't listen to Beatles at all, just John Lennon solo and occasionally some George Harrison but through my liking of Lennon solo i learned to at least appreciate what Beatles fans like. I "get it" even if i don't like it

SY hasnīt been me the band that changed my life. Not even Sister. The reason is that I just had listened so much epoch-making music before I heard a single SY-album (for example Hendrix, the Who, Pink Floyd, Wigwam, King Crimson, Beefheart, Tom Waits, Joy Division, Velvet Underground). But some reason I donīt quite understand SY came to my favourite band maybe in 2006.

I really would have wondered if Rob hadnīt put some SY album in this. Itīs not any rebuke, itīs really great thing. I think heīs much bigger SY-fan than I.

About the Beatles, I think no-one of them could do as great albums alone as they did in Beatles.

I'll show my age with this reply but I couldn't care less. In grade school I liked music, but as a relatively minor interest among many. But around the time I started junior high school, in the waning days of summer, I was in my bedroom listening to the radio when Sly and the Family Stone's Hot Fun In The Summertime came on. I had heard the song before but this time something clicked--I thought, "This is a REALLY good song". Yes, it praises warm weather fun, but it goes deeper than that. That's what started my fascination with music. I began listening to songs more closely, which led to my searching for stuff (pre-internet, you understand) beyond what you could hear on the radio, which led me to a lifetime of musical fanaticism. All that money on recorded music and concerts, and probably not being as far ahead in my career as I would be otherwise...was it worth it? Yes!

Sonic Youth hasn't been the *only* band to change my life. Nirvana had already done so in many ways, perhaps having a greater impact on my future than anyone else. But I realize now that part of my fascination with them was due to having a father whose love of the Beatles was like a deeply engrained personality trait. I grew up listening to the Beatles, and hearing the old man (when he was kind enough to grace me with his presence) tell stories about seeing them in the '60s, and being on the front lines of the greatest pop culture phenomenon in history.

I saw something of the Beatles in Nirvana, being just old enough and just interested enough to understand that they were occupying a position of similar significance, though on a much, much smaller scale.

So, like any good son of an absent alcoholic father, I took shelter in denial and hero-worship, and I emulated him. I really did fucking love Nirvana, and still do (more so than even, actually), but looking back on it, I can see how some of my Nirvana infatuation may have been a result of environment and circumstance. A coping mechanism. And therefore not entirely "me" or my own. And while I was sincerely smitten with that music, and I certainly felt Kurt's death shake my worldview like an earthquake, there was something archetypal about the whole thing.

But my experience with Sonic Youth was different. knew that there was no universality to their sound. I didn't have friends who listened to them... I knew that to some (many?), much of their music was virtually unlistenable. But I also knew that there was a large community of people who felt that they made perfect music. I already enjoyed the first few albums I'd picked up, but I would never have played them alone in the car for a long drive. And to be fair, they were fairly challenging records. This was back when albums like Antichrist Superstar and Life is Peachy were more or less what teenage boys wanted to hear. So I think SY was special for me from the get go because I couldn't talk to my friends about them, and if I put their music on, it was in the background.

Daydream Nation was definitive and personal and my love for it was unique, something I'd never felt in response to music before. I knew that plenty of the bands I loved when I was 13 simply wouldn't wouldn't appeal to me in adulthood.
Daydream Nation was very different. The maturity of the music was palpable. I was responding to the music and the aura and the hue of the sound; I wasn't just relating to some angsty lyric about divorce or the status quo. I was appreciating art on my own, in my own way, independent of the influence of friends, siblings, MTV, radio or any other warped and market driven notion of what was or should be "cool". There was something really pure about it, and I loved the idea that I was having an authentic reaction to something, and it had nothing to do with marketing, or trends, or high school, or what anyone else thought I "should" be doing.

In this way, I associate SY and Daydream Nation in particular, with a key phase in the development of my identity and my path to independent self discovery.

^ that started as a response to Mortte's comment about having heard a great deal of "epoch making" music before getting into SY. Basically, same here. Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Ramones, Nirvana, MBV... I just feel there's a distinction between the music I was surrounded by for various reasons and the music I made the explicit choice to surround myself with later.

Sonic Youth hasn't been the *only* band to change my life. Nirvana had already done so in many ways, perhaps having a greater impact on my future than anyone else. But I realize now that part of my fascination with them was due to having a father whose love of the Beatles was like a deeply engrained personality trait. I grew up listening to the Beatles, and hearing the old man (when he was kind enough to grace me with his presence) tell stories about seeing them in the '60s, and being on the front lines of the greatest pop culture phenomenon in history.

I saw something of the Beatles in Nirvana, being just old enough and just interested enough to understand that they were occupying a position of similar significance, though on a much, much smaller scale.

So, like any good son of an absent alcoholic father, I took shelter in denial and hero-worship, and I emulated him. I really did fucking love Nirvana, and still do (more so than even, actually), but looking back on it, I can see how some of my Nirvana infatuation may have been a result of environment and circumstance. A coping mechanism. And therefore not entirely "me" or my own. And while I was sincerely smitten with that music, and I certainly felt Kurt's death shake my worldview like an earthquake, there was something archetypal about the whole thing.

But my experience with Sonic Youth was different. knew that there was no universality to their sound. I didn't have friends who listened to them... I knew that to some (many?), much of their music was virtually unlistenable. But I also knew that there was a large community of people who felt that they made perfect music. I already enjoyed the first few albums I'd picked up, but I would never have played them alone in the car for a long drive. And to be fair, they were fairly challenging records. This was back when albums like Antichrist Superstar and Life is Peachy were more or less what teenage boys wanted to hear. So I think SY was special for me from the get go because I couldn't talk to my friends about them, and if I put their music on, it was in the background.

Daydream Nation was definitive and personal and my love for it was unique, something I'd never felt in response to music before. I knew that plenty of the bands I loved when I was 13 simply wouldn't wouldn't appeal to me in adulthood.
Daydream Nation was very different. The maturity of the music was palpable. I was responding to the music and the aura and the hue of the sound; I wasn't just relating to some angsty lyric about divorce or the status quo. I was appreciating art on my own, in my own way, independent of the influence of friends, siblings, MTV, radio or any other warped and market driven notion of what was or should be "cool". There was something really pure about it, and I loved the idea that I was having an authentic reaction to something, and it had nothing to do with marketing, or trends, or high school, or what anyone else thought I "should" be doing.

In this way, I associate SY and Daydream Nation in particular, with a key phase in the development of my identity and my path to independent self discovery.

To me SY came first and after that Nirvana. I heard GOO first time about half year itīs release. But reason why I like it so much is that it reminds me many of the sixties stuff I loved. So the reason I started to love it wasnīt any "this is music Iīve never heard before" itīs more like "really great some todayīs band have made an album that is so much the music I love".

But I also really remember when I heard "Smells like teen Spirit" first time. It had pure energy that I hadnīt heard a long time. My brother bought Nevermind and I brought it to some our schoolīs party. Of course the most of the people didnīt understand it at all, but there were maybe three guys who went absolutely grazy about it and asked me whatīs this, itīs really great! Even that song has become some kind of Stairway to Heaven of grunge, I still remember that my first feeling always when I hear it. Later of course I met guys, who had been Nirvana-fans already in Bleach-time (you know there are always guys who heard great bands from their first demos, Metallica was playing in a very small Place in Finland after they had made Kill Em All, there were guys watching it, but not me).

I think those were great times, I think grunge was the last true youth movement. Year after hearing Smells like teen spirit like many other fans in Finland I went to see Nirvana in a Ruisrock-festival. It was a little bit disappointment to me, but I think I will remember it rest of my life.

Anyway Nirvana become a band almost everybody of my friends listened, SY was never as popular here. But even I liked Nirvana then and has liked it also later, it never became as important to me as SY.

About Nirvana & the Beatles, I have always thought Nevermind is kind of Beatles-album made in the nineties way.

I'm not sure how much any record has really changed my life. Some bands have increased my appreciation for music, or changed my listening and music purchasing habits. But pinning those changes to one record is kind of unrealistic to me. More than one record it sort of a giant mess of this song or that song, particular live experiences, and various things I've read.

Certain friendships I have have used a shared love of music as a springboard to something greater, but again I couldn't highlight one record that was pivotal in this.

Public Enemy probably made me aware of more important real world issues that I didn't know about but that is thanks to their general message as a band, rather than one record or another, (I was 10 or 11 when I first heard them and I can't remember which album I heard first anyway).

Nirvana was a big deal for me and made me stop listening to everything else when I got into Nevermind. And then 36 Chambers got me back in to hiphop a few years later.

Pertinent to Sonic Youth, they have probably had a greater affect on broadening my tastes and also resulted in a few friendship that have spilled out from this message board and into real life, and even lead to trips to Greece and Montenegro. I guess the SY release that set me on the road to being a life long fan is The Year Punk Broke, which is VHS tape and not a record. So maybe there's your answer.